Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (930 mails)

[Rupert Horstkötter <rhorstkoetter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Community,

without much enthusiam I read this thread which is packed with
inappropriate attacks and dis-respect. I wonder what we're trying to
achieve as a community here. May someone tell me? From my perspective,
and I have a pretty good insight into the forums as you may assume,
the forums administration shouldn't be a target of frustration and
un-deliberated comments about their contribution to the openSUSE
Project.

Having a bit more of a REAL insight into the forums, I have to outline
that bashing the forums for being a incompetent accumulation of
in-efficiency and deny them of being interested in collaboartion
simply doesn't hold true. First of all, it's inappropriate to cite
soapbox forums discussion, because they have nothing to do with
competency but cover everything from current events to bananas. Second
of all, while reading this particular thread, Jim Henderson, our
well-respected forums admin, is that particular discussion participant
that actually is accessible and tries to collaborate. I can't see this
from the other side of the fence, sorry. It's anyway unfortunate that
we need to talk about fences here. We're community and we have the
very same goal in mind. We're not in war with each other. I hope so at
least.

To remain on topic, I take the time to explain something pretty
straightforward to the audience: The forums are a VERY important part
of the community as it's the communication medium that is to be seen
as the "low hanging fruit". Unbelievable for nerds maybe, but most of
the population doesn't even know what a mailing list actually is. That
said, Jim Henderson correctly outlined that a pool of contributors is
recruited out of a pool of users and thus it's imho ridiculous and btw
harmful to the Project's Goals to bash the forums in that regard just
for the reason to obscure the REAL reason we fail in growing our
community (yes Gentlemen, that's our problem): The real reason from my
perspective is the climate and thinking behind statements like:

"So they either will start touse communication channels that are used
by the rest of the world to provide their input or their input will
get lost within all that mess that currently
makes up those "forums"."

Putting forums in double quotes? Do I need to tell you more about
reasons of separation within the community?

I know that I won't make friends by sending this but IMO we should
think about solving the issues we have and the solution is simple.
You, developers/experienced users, need to participate in the forums
if you're serious with growing Community. You need to be accessible to
proposals out of the "enemies'" headquarters. The forums
administartion often asked for mailing list/forums integration without
any responses, we set up NNTP for people not aligned to a web
interface etc etc. What have you done?

This isn't a forums issue and the reason that the forums are divided
from the rest is to search for outside the forums not inside. There
are communities able to solve these issues as they focus on the lowest
entry border - look at Ubuntu. Why do you think their community is
growing? As they are bashing their lowest hanging fruit medium?
Obviously not! They are friendly (internally and especially to the
outside) and that's the area we fail. We have brilliant developers and
tools in place to rock the world but we're too silly to utilize those
and this honestly is discouraging. Why don't you get started really
reflecting where our issues are and start solving it by changing your
minds. That way we may achieve what we all want to achieve, as a team,
across communication media!

My proposal would be to sit together and bring issues to the table and
think about resolving those, e.g. with a mailing list/forums
integration. Even more important is to understand that forums are
needed and it's impossible to align forum users to mailing lists. Get
your ass to the forums (sorry!) and interact with the community of
45.000+ users out there. Teach them and lower the border into our
community. Is that that difficult. Sorry but if you tell me it
actually is, I'm not that sure if you're really serious with the goal
in recruitinmg contributors and if I'm not completely out of
discussion that's our common goal, isn't it?

Respectfully,
R
-- 
Rupert Horstkötter
open-slx Community Manager
openSUSE Board Member
http://open-slx.com/
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